Pick the Right Bridge

That great old movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai, was on cable again the other night.  It is the story of, among other things, the power of a great goal to motivate--even if it is the wrong goal.

In the psychology of hope, we can see how critical having goals is to having hope.  Both "willpower" and "waypower" receive structure and motivation as elements in the pursuit of goals.  When Lt. Colonel Nicholson (played brilliantly by Alec Guiness) arrives at the prison camp, he finds the British prisoners in military disarray.  He sees that they are in danger of becoming a disorganized rabble.

Nicholson asserts order first for insisting that British officers, per the Geneva Convention, shall not do manual labor.  So far, so good.  He pays for his insistence through brutal physical punishment and threats of death for himself and his men.  In the end, however, he triumphs and demoralizes his Japanese counterpart into cooperation.

Great leader that he is, Nicholson seeks an opportunity to bring his men together around a common goal.  So far, that goal has been to sabotage the bridge that is so crucial to completion of the Burma railway.  The prisoners have stymied the work quite effectively, but their military discipline is a shambles.  Nicholson persuades his officers and men to focus on building the best bridge possible.  At first it is a way to bring discipline, respect and dignity back to the prisoners.

Then the bridge itself becomes the goal.  One of the officers notes that timber is locally available much like the timber used in the old London bridge.  Those timbers stood for seven hundred years.  "Just imagine," Nicholson muses, "seven hundred years.  Wouldn't that be something!"  The project has moved from the goal of saving the men to a focus on building a bridge.

In the end, just in time, Nicholson realizes his error in judgment.  "My God!" he exclaims, "what have I done?"  His loss of goal focus costs many good people, including Nicholson, their lives.  In his redemptive death, he falls on the plunger and detonates the plastic explosives attached to the bridge.  In dying he accomplished that which he resisted in living.

The psychology of hope is very helpful in providing tactics and strategy for moving forward.  That discipline cannot, however, really distinguish between life-giving goals and death-dealing goals.  Hitler gave the German people goals that included the extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and the developmentally disabled.  It was an effective program and was also a definition of evil.  Nicholson used the bridge effectively and almost disastrously.

Our goals cannot come from within the psychology of hope.  I follow Jesus, so my ends and purposes come from the theology of hope.  All Christian hope is Resurrection hope.  All Christian hope is rooted in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  All Christian hope seeks that Resurrection living as the one goal that matters.

It is the theology of hope that keeps me off my personal bridges over the River Kwai in my life.